Books of Poetics

Please click the covers for information about each book.

The product of a lifetime of writing, reading, editing, teaching, and loving poetry, this unique, accessible, and delightful book is jam-packed with everything you need to know to excel at the craft of the poet, whether you are an accomplished poet or a student, part of a group of writers or on your own.

“This was the first poetry textbook that clicked with everyone in my class. Every one of them can understand it, and they rave about how much they are learning.”—Ivy Page

“Nothing Less than an MFA program in 800 pages.” —G.M. Palmer

Excerpted from A Poet’s Craft, this uniquely thorough handbook covers basic meters and traditional European forms along with poetic forms brought to English from worldwide cultures and postmodern forms and techniques, including the most illuminating and comprehensive discussion of non-iambic meters in print.” —From the publisher

 

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Both a survey and a guide to the exploration of poetic form . . . more diverse and comprehensive than any other form handbook, A Poet’s Ear will be essential to the serious student of poetry.” -University of Michigan Press

Essays, reviews, and memoir by one of the brightest poet-critics of her generation . . . topics include music and poetry, translation, postmodern form, and poets from Wheatley to Hacker, all with the aim “to nourish a new kind of American poetics, one that will prove increasingly open to poetry’s heart.””—From the Publisher

“. . offers a glimpse into the criticism and esthetics of a refreshingly singular critic. . . Finch revivifies the dusty vault of prosody with the arcane dexterity of a necromancer.”
— Art New England

“A breathtakingly original—and highly readable— book, The Ghost of Meter develops a breakthrough theory that listens in a new way to the deep rhythms of poetry in our culture by combining semiotics and prosody.”
—From the publisher

“[Finch is] a perceptive and aurally literate reader . . . I would bet that a whole generation of critics will learn from Finch how to hear the poems they read.”

— Style